en and women must have stood a whole minute--dumb as stones--before
there came that long curdling shriek for which they waited. The great
masts quivered for a second against the darkness; then heaved, lurched,
and reeled down, crashing on the Raney.

CHAPTER III.

THE STRANGER.

As the ship struck, night closed down again, and her agony, sharp or
lingering, was blotted out. There was no help possible; no arm that
could throw across the three hundred yards that separated her from the
cliffs; no swimmer that could carry a rope across those breakers; nor
any boat that could, with a chance of life, put out among them. Now and
then a dull crash divided the dark hours, but no human cry again reached
the shore.

Day broke on a grey sea still running angrily, a tired and shivering
group upon the beach, and on the near side of the Raney a shapeless
fragment, pounded and washed to and fro--a relic on which the watchers
could in their minds re-build the tragedy.

The Raney presents a sheer edge to seaward--an edge under which the
first vessel, though almost grazing her side, had driven in plenty of
water. Shorewards, however, it descends by gradual ledges.
Beguiled by the bonfire, or mistaking Ruby's lantern for the tossing
stern-light of a comrade, the second ship had charged full-tilt on the
reef and hung herself upon it, as a hunter across a fence. Before she
could swing round, her back was broken; her stern parted, slipped back
and settled in many fathoms; while the fore-part heaved forwards,
toppled down the reef till it stuck, and there was slowly brayed into
pieces by the seas. The tide had swept up and ebbed without dislodging
it, and now was almost at low-water mark.

"'May so well go home to breakfast," said Elias Sweetland, grimly, as he
took in what the uncertain light could show.

"Here, Young Zeb, look through my glass," sang out Farmer Tresidder,
handing the telescope. He had been up at the vicarage drinking hot grog
with the parson and the rescued men, when Sim Udy ran up with news of
the fresh disaster; and his first business on descending to the Cove had
been to pack Ruby and Mary Jane off to bed with a sound rating. Parson
Babbage had descended also, carrying a heavy cane (the very same with
which he broke the head of a Radical agitator in the bar of the "Jolly
Pilchards," to the mild scandal of the diocese), and had routed the rest
of the women and chastised the drunken. The parson was a re